PERSPECTIVES FOR BUILDING REVOLUTIONARY PARTY IN US

PERSPECTIVES FOR BUILDING REVOLUTIONARY PARTY IN U.S.,

main resolution adopted by founding conference of the Workers League  

1. The United States emerged from World War II in complete dominance of the world capitalist system. However, this system was in the throes of a deep crisis. Only the collaboration of the Stalinists, as well as the labor bureaucrats and social democrats, allowed the capitalists to temporarily emerge from this crisis. The period of the 1950s was marked by a capitalist boom based primarily on the economic development of Western Europe. While the European capitalists grew in economic power in this period, the United States grew even more. U.S. imperialism entered the 1960s with its dominance unshaken. 

2. By the end of the 1950s the expansion of American capitalism upon the basis of the European economy had begun to run its course. The 1960s has been a period of growing crisis and instability in the capitalist system as a whole. This crisis is expressed on an international scale primarily in the world liquidity crisis, the conflicts and rivalries among the imperialists as seen most clearly in France's attempt at economic autarchy, and the deepening crisis in the underdeveloped capitalist nations. 

3. The greater and greater reliance of U.S. imperialism on military force (Vietnam and the Dominican Republic) and its successful efforts in toppling left nationalist regimes and setting up military dictatorships (Algeria, Indonesia, Ghana) are not signs of the strength of capitalism. Rather, they are a reflection of the deep crisis of capitalism - the inability of the capitalist system to carry through the democratic revolution in the colonial countries, which could thus open up a new period for world capitalist growth. Incapable of providing an economic base for any serious independent economic development in these countries, the U.S. is forced to supplant the more independent representatives of national capitalism with subservient military regimes. 

4. To state that capitalism is today in a period of crisis and that this crisis undermines in particular the dominant capitalist nation - the United States - does not mean that this crisis has yet reached the point of a conjunctural downturn of large proportions. Nor do we exclude temporary periods of considerable economic growth such as the U.S. has recently passed through. While the U.S. entered a general period of stagnation in the late 1950s, there have been specific years of substantial economic growth. The U.S. capitalists have accrued tremendous resources which give them a certain room to maneuver. The role of the working class leadership has been an even more important factor in propping up capitalism. The international cooperation of the Stalinist bureaucracies, the opening up even partially of the great Eastern European and Russian markets to capitalist penetration, as well as, of course, the role played by the labor bureaucracy in the capitalist countries, are no doubt contributing to propping up capitalist rule. However, it is important to recognize that the rightward turn of the Soviet bureaucracy itself accentuates the contradictions of the bureaucracy and prepares a tremendous political-economic crisis in the Soviet orbit. 

5. A conjunctural downturn is definitely building up within the world capitalist structure and in particular within U.S. capitalism. We cannot predict exactly when or how it will occur, for this will be determined by the course of the class struggle itself and our intervention within it, not by some automatic process. Nor is it that important that we know exactly when it will take place. Preoccupation with this question of when the downturn will come, and equating this downturn with an awakening of the working class, are manifestations of a passive objectivist perspective so clearly expressed by the Socialist Workers Party. For years this party predicted a bust which would propel the working class into the ranks of the party, assuming from the postwar period that quiescence was the rule for the American working class in this period and that when the "crisis" came the workers would wake up - or perhaps wake the radicals up! This neatly reversed the relationship between the working class and its vanguard, abandoning all pretense of leadership. The problem with this outlook was not simply that the coming crisis became a more and more distant event in the minds of the membership, but that it reduced the vanguard party to at best a subsidiary role, abandoning the field to such "instinctive Marxists'' as Fidel Castro, Ben Bella, et al. Our alternative to their approach is not to predict a bust sooner and mean it more fervently. Rather we must understand that the current crisis of world capitalism, partly hidden though it may be behind the surface of aggregate U.S. wealth, is being expressed today within the United States. American society is in every respect a reflection of the class struggle, and this class struggle must be related to the world wide class struggle which is intensifying as the capitalists seek to get out of their present bind. 

6. American Marxists must see the crisis of capitalism as a world crisis and the class struggle as a worldwide struggle. The struggle within the United States must be seen as interrelated with struggles in Western Europe, the Soviet Bloc countries, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The particular history of the United States has produced the present anomalous situation. On the one hand, the U.S. dominance is felt in every corner of the globe, and on the other hand the American people maintain their insular, provincial and isolationist prejudices. This outlook has a deep impact on the socialist movement, making the struggle for working class internationalism doubly difficult. The Workers League was born in a struggle for international principle within the SWP. It has maintained its internationalism despite the most extreme national pressures reflected by the Robertson group in 1962, the Philips group in 1964 and the Robertson group, this time joined by Marcus, once again in 1966. We can maintain and deepen this international outlook only by a constant and conscious theoretical struggle against nationalism within our own ranks. Only such a struggle can equip us to lead the American proletariat in a battle to overthrow the U.S. ruling class, the imperialist rulers of the world. 

American Working Class 

7. The world crisis of capitalism is presently having an impact on the American working class, though, as we have noted, not yet in the form of a conjunctural downturn. It is our task to understand the nature and character of this impact and to work out a program for mobilizing the working class to struggle against the capitalist class under the current circumstances. This is central to the task of building a proletarian Marxist party in the United States. 

8. The revolution in technological development which we call "automation" is a central factor affecting the American working class. Present and projected technology threatens to wipe out whole categories of workers. Underneath the statistics of general economic prosperity and generally full employment, technological change has already had a profound impact on sections of the working class. These techniques create an actual shrinking of jobs in many industrial fields despite an overall growth in the economy. While older seniority workers are able to hold onto their jobs, younger workers either cannot find work, or, being on the low end of the seniority pole, are the least secure and the first to be fired with even a minor dip in the economy. Thus in the midst of a period of great economic growth in the United States this problem of job security plagues longshore, auto, steel, coal mining, maritime, and printing - to mention just a few fields. 

9. The impact of this process on minority workers is particularly intense. The Negro has been fleeing the rural South since World War II in tremendous numbers as farm technology first supplanted the sharecropper and now is supplanting the farm laborer. In the wartime and immediate postwar years the Negro was absorbed into Southern and Northern industry in large numbers. More recently capitalism has used the Negro to maintain the pool of unemployed at the level which is necessary for capitalist stability. Negro unemployment is approximately double that of whites and this is even more severe for the Negro teenager. A similar process has affected the Mexican farm worker in the Southwest and this can be expected to intensify with the spread of automated farm machinery. The Puerto Ricans fled the poverty of this American colony in tremendous numbers in the postwar period. As some Negroes moved up into industry the Puerto Rican filled the lowest paid service and sweat shop jobs in the industrial Northeast. The postwar wave of Puerto Rican migration has passed, having resulted in a Puerto Rican population of over 1,000,000 on the mainland, concentrated in the Northeast. Today the Puerto Rican youth faces either low - paying dead end jobs or permanent unemployment. 

10. During the 1950s the trade union movement rode the crest of the general prosperity of the expanding economy. While there were important strikes, the capitalist class was generally able to contain the working class by allowing it to share in the overall prosperity. Needless to say the working class' share was nothing compared to the capitalists share, and the end result was a greater concentration of wealth in the hands of the capitalists. However, this was tolerated by the workers as long as they felt their jobs were secure and their own living standards had noticeably improved. The 1950s was the great heyday for the labor bureaucracy, which grew fat as the mediator between classes during a period when the economic substance to allow for such a mediation existed. 

11. The trade union movement today faces a different situation. The trade union bureaucracy still seeks to play the role it has always played. On the surface, in fact, things appear to be much as they have been. But the international crisis of the capitalist system is beginning to have an impact on the trade union movement. Johnson's policy of "wage restraint", centering around the demand that wage increases be kept within the 3.2% range, is a sign of the intention of the capitalist class to seek to maintain its increasingly fat profits and its world position at the expense of the American working class. It must be understood that the U.S. capitalists require an "incomes policy" just as do their British counterparts and every capitalist class in this period. All those impressionists who do not recognize the forces which are impelling the ruling class to prepare a serious attack on the working class remain blinded by surface appearances. They are completely incapable of intervening in the deepening class struggle. 

12. The recent New York City transit strike has importance in this regard. First, that the strike took place at all is a clear sign of the changing class relations in the United States. The weaknesses. of the American economy are particularly felt in New York City, which has been milked for years by the bankers. The: middle class white population has been fleeing, being replaced by poor Negroes and Puerto Ricans, many of whom are unemployed. The bankers and Lindsay decided they would no longer deal with the TWU in the usual manner but force a strike. During the strike the capitalists did a generally effective job of turning the rest of the population against the strikers, thus seeking to create an antiunion bias which can be helpful to them in future class’ struggles. However, the strike was settled, if not on the basis of meaningful concessions to the workers, at least not on the basis of a serious defeat for the union. Rather the settlement reflected a stalemate - the working class being weakened by its lack of a class conscious leadership and the capitalist class not yet ready for an all-out war against the working class. 

13. The working class is affected by this general crisis of capitalism in other ways in addition to its direct relationship to production. This can be seen most clearly by the current Vietnam war. While the war has produced a very high level of employment it has also created a growing inflation. The inflation threatens to take away the gains the working class makes at the bargaining table whenever the workers go to the supermarket. There is no doubt that there is rising resentment of the constant rise in the cost of living which has its greatest impact on the workers. The increases in direct and indirect taxation are eating away at the living standards of the workers whose wages are fixed by long term contracts. The tendency for transportation costs to increase hits particularly hard at the lowest-paid workers. To those millions of workers who the government admits do not now earn enough to support a family adequately, increased public transportation costs and increased state and local taxes will mean as much as another 5% decrease in real wages. This is in addition to increases in living costs due to increases in food, housing and clothing costs. Johnson's efforts to impose wage restraints under these conditions should enable us to expose unmistakably to the workers where he stands and whom he represents. 

Transitional Program 

14. The strategic task of the Workers League is to elaborate a transitional program for uniting the working class in a common struggle against the capitalist class in this current transitional period. Our ability to grow and develop as the capitalist crisis deepens will depend on our ability to become a part of the struggle today. Such a program can only be developed by a deepening of the theoretical development of our organization as, in the political sense, part of an international party. At the same time we must deepen our actual intervention into the mass movement. Such intervention depends primarily on political line. We reject the concept that our tasks flow primarily from our numerical size. Rather our tasks flow from the application of a Marxist program developed by means of a strategic analysis of the current stage of the class struggle internationally and in our own country. The struggle against revisionist currents within the working class movement is a part of the process of developing such a transitional program and implementing it. It is false to view such a political and theoretical struggle as separated from the class struggle itself. 

15. The development of a specific transitional program for the working class today must essentially be an elaboration of, concretization of the Transitional Program adopted by the Founding Conference of the Fourth International in 1938. This document was no episodic matter. It was based on an understanding of the entire epoch in which we live and struggle today. However, it is not a matter of delving into the Transitional Program as one does into a recipe book, seeking a phrase or a slogan to repeat, the content of which one does not understand. 

16. Our aim is to unify the working class as a class, to sharpen its break from the capitalist class and to break it from the politics of the ruling class. In the course of this struggle we must show the working class that it can and must overthrow the capitalist class and create its own state, a workers' state. For unity, for struggle, the working class needs its own party, a Marxist party, the party we are seeking to create. 

Labor Party 

17. At this stage in the development of the American working class our central transitional demand. must be the creation of a labor party, a party of the American working class. The working class must be shown that it must of necessity go beyond isolated economic struggles to a fundamental political struggle against the ruling class and its political instruments. The labor party demand thus becomes the unifying demand of all our work in the United States. It must permeate all our propaganda and agitation: among the working class youth, in the trade unions, among the minority peoples, around the war question. Until such time as the American working class starts on the road to independent political struggle the class can make little progress. Only on this fundamental political plane can the broad class issues which unite all sections of the class come to the fore and the parochial, separatist, dividing issues be pushed into the background. 

18. While a labor party is a beginning of the process of the American working class entering the political arena it will be by no means the end, for the working class must develop a conscious Marxist party. Nor can we seek to impose on future political development too rigid a formula from the past. It is in no sense laid down that the American working class will create a labor party in the same way that the British Labor Party was. created. In fact it is far more likely that the development of a labor party in the United States will take on a more radical character. A class with such immense power which has waited so long to enter the political arena can hardly be expected to enter it peacefully, nor can the capitalist class be expected to react peacefully to such a fundamental change in what it views as the accepted "rules of the game.'' From its very origins it can be expected that the first real party of American labor will be a tumultuous and contradictory development. 

19. It is important that we develop our propaganda and agitation around the labor party slogan in such a way that we link the existing struggles and the related level of the more conscious militants with the generalizing concept of the labor party. We must avoid presenting the concept in a formal and abstract way: Thus, while a labor party must rely on the American trade union movement as its major base, it does not follow that the main impetus for the labor party now and in the immediate period ahead will necessarily come out of the trade union movement. Embryonic developments in the direction of a labor party can begin within the Negro movement in the South, among Negroes and other minority peoples in Northern ghettos, and even around the war question. In all such cases we must struggle within these movements to turn the movement towards the broad layers of the class and the trade union movement in particular. While the movement towards a labor party can get its start outside the trade union movement it must develop a base within the organized labor movement before it can develop into a serious force. Further, unless such movements struggle to become a movement of the class as a whole they will of necessity lose what ever class program they have achieved, as they maneuver between the existing capitalist parties rather than struggling to supplant them.

20. In our work in the trade union movement we must expose the class character of the Johnson Administration as well as city and state administrations. We must expose the government's union-busting aims and counterpose to the policy of supporting the parties of the bosses a new party of the American working class. In our work in the ghetto communities and among minority workers in general we must sharply counterpose class politics, in the form of the call for a labor party, to race politics. While the Negro people must have their own organizations of struggle within their own communities it does not follow that they should have their own separate political parties. A political party formed on race, not class grounds can only tie the Negro masses to the system rather than breaking them from the system. (Since Negroes are only 11% of the population, even if they could achieve a multiclass unity on a racial basis, they would find themselves capable only of maneuvering between class forces in the United States and incapable of replacing the ruling class which lies behind both class and race oppression.) We must struggle for a labor party which will unite black .and white workers in a common struggle against the common oppressor rather than concede to race politics. The concept of a labor party must also. be taken into the antiwar movement. The struggle against the war policies of the U.S. imperialists cannot be separated from the other anti-working class policies of the imperialists. Middle class political parties set up on a "classless" basis to fight the "war issue" are futile efforts and serve to obscure the class issues involved rather than to explain them. 

21. We must develop a transitional program to combat the threat of automation to the working class. Here the slogan of 30 hours work for 40 hours pay must be actively fought for as a method of placing the burden of the costs for new automated techniques on the capitalists rather than the workers. It also is central to developing the unity of the employed and unemployed workers. Thus it can be a bridge to connect the organized working class with the Negroes and other minorities who suffer the greatest unemployment. The technological changes taking place in the economy are causing important shifts in industry. Particular industries, such as coal mining, almost face extinction, while other industries, such as electronics, expand at a rapid rate. Certain sections of the working class develop a high level of income while others, such as sweat shop workers, municipal workers, teachers and hospital workers lag behind. The general prosperity among unionized workers spurs on the organization of the unorganized as in the current agricultural workers' struggles in California and Mississippi. In addition to 30 for 40 we must actively struggle for the organization of the unorganized. We may find that some of the most important openings for the intervention of our movement will be in organizing campaigns (the grape pickers) and in new unions (teachers, welfare workers, hospital workers). We must unite these newer sections of the union movement with the older sections, struggling all the time against divisive forces combined with organizing the unorganized and organizing the unemployed is the key to a transitional program for the trade union movement. These demands must also be related to the struggle for a political party of the working class. We can do this by exposing the role of the capitalist state in supporting the capitalists' effort to place the costs of technical change and of the general crisis of the system on the backs of the workers. 

22. The building of rank and file caucuses in struggle against the labor bureaucracy must be a major task of ours in the trade unions. The central demand for the creation of a labor party must be acted upon, must become a weapon of struggle. The rest of our program for the trade union movement and the working class as a whole must also develop with experience, in response to its being acted upon and its being taken up within the union movement. This development of our program along with the building of militant caucuses can only proceed along with the most fierce struggle against the trade union bureaucracy and all its hangers-on.

 

23. We must develop a transitional program for the workers as consumers as well as producers. Here we must expose the capitalist government's policy of wage restraint while prices gallop upward. The way in which inflation is used, as another method of decreasing the wealth of the workers and increasing that of the capitalists, must be exposed. The ever increasing burden of taxation must also be exposed. We must show how the workers are being made to pay for the capitalist state's wars and general bankruptcy - how the banks milk both the federal and local governments and how we are forced to pay higher taxes to pay off loans to the banks. The housing question is related to this. We must expose the role of the banks as the real recipients of the exorbitant rents ‘charged by the slumlords, as the real vested interests perpetrating the slum conditions under which masses of poorer workers, particularly minority workers, live. In relation to the above we must fight against the rise in prices under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. We must demand taxation that really affects the rich and an end to all taxes aimed mainly at the most exploited workers, and all taxes on incomes below $5000. We must raise the demand for the nationalization of the banks under workers' control to rid the country of their domination and their exploitation of the working class. We must demand the nationalization of housing as the only real way to eradicate slums. Related to this, we should develop a program demanding that people be put to work in a new building campaign to tear down the slums and build decent housing for all. Such a demand unites the construction workers and the minority peoples who live in the slums and need employment in a common struggle against the banks, the slumlords and their state. It is about time American socialists started talking about nationalization under workers' control to the working people of this country. 

24. The questions of workers’ power, workers' democracy, and armed self-defense of the working class are a critical part of the struggle for the transitional demands. The working class must struggle to control its own organizations. It must rely only on itself to defend these organizations from attacks by fascists and the bosses. We must relate the elemental struggle for workers' democracy with the struggle for workers' power, for a workers' government. The labor party is an essential link in the struggle for a workers' government. The struggle within the trade union movement for transitional demands must be a struggle to develop a militant wing to dump the labor bureaucracy and restore democratic control by the rank and file to the unions. Tenants committees. and other grass-roots community organizations also raise the concept of workers' control at the consumer end of the process. Police terror in the Northern ghettos and throughout the South already is raising the need for armed self-defense of the working people. Strikes in the future will also raise this issue, as they have in the past. These are all extremely embryonic defensive forms and it is our task not only to foster such forms but to explain that these elementary forms must develop into full-fledged organs of power which can overthrow the existing state and replace it with the dictatorship of the proletariat. It must be emphasized quite strongly in regard to community work and in reaching the working class as consumers that nothing can be settled on this level. While we do not ignore these struggles we seek to turn them at every point toward the organized working class and we fight all trends which seek to substitute social work among the poor or unemployed for the struggle to bring revolutionary consciousness to the organized working class.

Negro Movement 

25. The Negro movement must be an important field of work for our organization.  Clearly this work poses particular problems and special orientation. But once we lose sight of its place within class relations in the United States we are abandoning the Negro people to continued oppression. It is our specific task to bring class issues to the fore within the Negro movement despite the current dominance of separatism and opportunism of various stripes. 

26. As we have noted, the development of the Negro struggle has its origins in the changing position of the Negro within the economic structure. The flight of the Negro to the city combined with the failure of the U.S. economy to absorb the Negro are essential ingredients of Negro radicalization. It is precisely the general prosperity of the country which spurs on Negro resentment at the failure of the system to allow the Negro an equal} share in the prosperity. It is this which lies behind not only Watts but the struggle in the South as well. 

27. With class pressures felt more intensely by the Negro, the Negro responds more with a militancy, and a radicalism that is generally in advance of that of the working class as a whole. However, the Negro sees his oppression as essentially a race oppression and his struggle as an isolated one. It is within this framework that both the nationalists and the opportunists develop their strength. The separatists seek to transform the isolation into a virtue, seeking to build a separate economy, while the opportunists seek to break down the isolation by transforming the revolutionary struggle into a mere begging for concessions from the ruling class, concessions which largely benefit the Negro middle class. This racial outlook of the Negro is reinforced by the failure of large sections of both Northern and Southern Negroes to be integrated into the economic structure as worker. There has thus developed a largely unemployed or underemployed plebian mass particularly susceptible to racial demagogy. Separatism and opportunism have a great deal more in common than is commonly suggested, and both reflect non-working class pressures the movement. 

28. Our task is to pose a class program within the Negro movement with the greatest sharpness. There is no other way out for the Negro mass but to become a part of the struggle of the class as a whole. The solution for the Negro lies in the Negro playing as much of a vanguard role as possible in the kind of transitional struggles outlined above. This means mass struggles to organize the unorganized, as is being done with the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union, the NFWA (grape pickers), and the hospital workers, and as should be done for the hundreds of thousands of minority workers who are exploited in the sweat shops of large cities - especially New York. A housing program as outlined earlier is essential. Particular racial problems related to job discrimination and other issues must be seen within this framework. Above all we must raise the labor party demand within the Negro movement. Recent developments in the South clearly show that the Negro masses are beginning to realize that they must seek a political solution to their racial and class oppression. But they have no program for effective political struggle. While independent black parties at least represent an understanding of the need to break from capitalist politics. We must urge a class program on these parties. We must urge them to view themselves as a vanguard for the formation of a party of the class as a whole. 

29. Both the Puerto Ricans and the Mexicans play a role in our society similar to the Negro. Only a class program can unite the Puerto Rican, Mexican and Negro with the rest of the working class in a common struggle against the ruling class. The ruling class does its best to pit black against white and Negro against Puerto Rican or Mexican. The SWP and other groups, by their uncritical support for separatism and their ignoring of the class struggle, encourage this process rather than struggle against it. This must not be our role.

30. The war question should concern us not simply because of the current war in Vietnam. By the very character of capitalism, the policy of U.S. imperialism will require greater reliance on military might as each day passes. The struggle against imperialist war thus will continue to be before us until we come to power. The ruling class is able to survive because the working class fails to generalize. The worker sees clearly the role his employer plays but he does not relate this to the role the employers' government plays. Every attempt is made to atomize the worker, to pit one worker against another, to line up the worker in a common cause against an external "enemy", hiding at every point the interrelatedness of the whole development. Our task is to break through this by showing the real connection between the role of the employers, their government and the war in Vietnam, and the real solidarity of interest between the American working and the workers and peasants of Vietnam. 

31. We must expose the war in Vietnam for what it is, an imperialist war of oppression against the workers and peasants of Vietnam. We must explain that the young workers are being asked to die to defend increased taxation which is eating away at the gains of the working class while the capitalists profit. We must demand nationalization of the war industries, and transformation of these industries and the arms budget which feeds them into instruments designed to eradicate slums and poverty in the United States and to aid workers everywhere. We must take our stand at the side of the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front and struggle for the line of their military victory against all pacifist and reformist elements in the peace movement. 

32. The imperialist draft sharpens all the issues posed by the war. The ruling class is finding it more and more difficult to disguise its brutal policies with liberal phrases, and the war in Vietnam is undoubtedly the most unpopular war in U.S. history. The workers in particular are directly affected. While the capitalists conduct the war to defend their own interests, they demand as usual that the working class fight the war for them. Despite the vocal chauvinist statements of most union leaders and the undoubtedly widespread impact of chauvinist propaganda on the workers, there is also a restiveness over U.S. war policies among workers which was almost totally absent during the Korean war. This potential anti-war sentiment is most profoundly felt among the working class youth, particularly among young minority workers. With inevitably sharp increases in the number of casualties and fatalities if the war continues to be widened, present doubts can be turned into determined working class opposition to the war. This is the kind of opposition to the war which can and must be built. 

33. We consequently can have as little in common politically with the liberal-pacifist chatter about personal responsibility and individual action as we have with the liberal, Social-Democratic and Stalinist program of ending the war by exerting "pressure'' on the government and supporting the so-called doves. This means that we call for collective opposition to the war and not individual acts of heroism or pacifism. We do not hold the individual soldier responsible for the war any more than we hold the German "Nation" responsible for Nazism. At the same time as we stand for the defeat of the American troops in Vietnam we explain and appeal to the soldiers that this position is in their interests because they are fighting for their masters and not for themselves. We do not advocate that students or workers evade the draft or burn draft cards. We do advocate a real fight against the draft. We oppose student deferments as well as the entire selective service system. All opponents of the war must reject personal solutions or class privileges. They must go to the young workers wherever they live and work and convince them in struggle of the need to oppose the war. 

34. Because the Vietnam war is the sharpest expression (but of course not the only expression) of the world capitalist crisis, the attitude taken towards the war and how to fight it is crucial and different tendencies in the working class movement to the test. Our differences with all types of revisionists are clearly expressed through the issue of how we relate to the working class and the existing antiwar element. This movement itself is at present essentially a pacifist-dominated middle class movement, isolated from the working ass. Our role within the movement is to turn towards the working class as well as to struggle against anti-working class political currents within it who preach one or another variety of international class collaboration. Whether the peace movement as it is grows or dies is not essential. The only real potential antiwar force in the United States or anywhere is the working class and the working class and its struggles cannot disappear. Our task is to the best of our ability bring working class consciousness into the antiwar movement and antiwar consciousness into the working class.

Against Revisionism

35. The struggle for political and theoretical clarity within the socialist vanguard of the working class is a central part of the general struggle of the working class against the capitalist class. However it cannot be viewed in isolation from that struggle. We reject completely the concept of seeking some kind of "hegemony" within the socialist movement first and then later proceeding to intervention in the mass movement itself. At every step along the way to power in the United States we must fuse our struggle against alien class views and methods both within the socialist movement and as are found among the broader masses of the population. We cannot wait to do mass work until we have "radical hegemony" or a certain arbitrary number of members, or even a certain theoretical level ourselves. Rather we must do this work as best we can with the forces we have presently, seeking to develop ourselves theoretically in the process while at the same time conducting a ruthless struggle against revisionism nor work in the mass movement can move forward if they are not seen as two parts of the same struggle to build a Marxist party. We suspect our ability to do this will be more limited by our own development than it will be by numbers. 

36. Our primary concern in this struggle against revisionism must continue to be the SWP. The SWP represents the center of the international Pabloite tendency whose central role is to bring alien class views into the Trotskyist movement. We have yet to come to a final reckoning with this grouping and our success in the United States will be very definitely related to our struggle in this regard. It is not primarily a question of how many members we may win from the SWP, but rather of an obstacle which must be removed and of completing our break with the revisionism of the SWP. The collision of the SWP with the interests of the working class in the U.S. cannot help but produce an explosive internal crisis.  

37. The Spartacists must be understood as a "left" expression of the nationalism and revisionism of the SWP. As this group never faced up to the history of the SWP and understood its essential character, so they inevitably fall prey to its nationalism, its theoretical bankruptcy, its unprincipled school of politics.. Spartacist is a group without perspective or principle. Like the Abern group in the SWP before it, it’ represents a sick and dangerous tendency within the radical movement. A conscious theoretical and political struggle against this group is part of the struggle against the revisionism of the SWP. 

38. We must remain open to every opportunity to intervene politically within the radical organizations in the United States as we have in the past, especially with the Progressive Labor Party. The developing class struggles in the United States cannot fail to put each organization to the test and open up new opportunities for winning over new forces to Marxism. In addition, despite their isolation from the working class in most instances, we must take account of the various currents in the radical movement because they reflect the historical development of the working class movement. They are in this way connected to the class, even in the most indirect way, and we must confront them and struggle against them in order to learn the lessons of the past history and struggles of the working class. 

39. It would be a serious error to ignore the potential for betrayal of the American Stalinist party.  The Communist Party must be dealt with seriously, and will remain a serious enemy until the worldwide struggle for socialism defeats and removes the counterrevolutionary Soviet bureaucracy. This will be equally necessary in relation to the youth movement and in some sections of the trade unions. 

40. In all our work - in the trade union movement, the Negro movement, the anti-war movement, and the existing radical movement - we must recognize that the crisis of capitalism affects different sections of social classes in different ways. It will be primarily the young workers and students who will be most receptive to our program at this stage. This crisis affects them more deeply and they have fewer conservatizing ties to hold them back from struggle. Our aim must be to reach these young workers and those students who can be integrated into the working class movement, and with these young cadres seek to link up with the older sections of the class in common struggle against the class enemy. 

Workers League 

41. Our own organization is susceptible to all the pressures of American economic wealth, especially as reflected through the middle class strata. This problem of middle class pressures cannot be solved by a syndicalist organizational turn as the French Voix Ouvriere group proposes: Nor can we afford to make no attempt to break out of a petty bourgeois radical existence. We must take an objective and scientific attitude to our own organization and its development. What is necessary is to combine a struggle to penetrate the mass movement as best we can equipped with the transitional program with a constant internal struggle for dialectical materialism. This must be our means to achieve proletarianization and in this we have already made very significant progress. Marxist organization is a conscious struggle, the only arena of conscious struggle against the class system and its reflections. We must view our organization as part of an international movement, although formal affiliation is impossible for legal reasons, and recognize that only through the subordination politically of our group to the world party can we avoid succumbing to the dominant class pressures in the United States. Those groups which break from internationalism, like Spartacist, cannot fail to succumb in time to the pressures of their own bourgeoisie. Super militancy and super activism will not help one whit. 

42. It cannot be stressed too strongly that the building of the Marxist party is impossible without the most strenuous and constant struggle for the Philosophy of dialectical materialism. We can never be satisfied with orthodox phrases as a substitute for a truly scientific approach to the constantly changing reality. The struggle against the Pabloite revisionists, represented in the U.S. above all by the SWP, has taught us over and over again the absolute necessity for a rounded theoretical and philosophical struggle against pragmatism and empiricism. Non-revolutionary habits of thought and of work are inevitably carried into the Marxist movement and must be constantly fought. The SWP has already succumbed to the pressures of the bourgeoisie in the form of pragmatism. The Workers League alone represents the continuity of revolutionary Marxism, of Trotskyism in the United States.